B’nai Brith Organ Denies Supreme Court Judge’s Claim “we Are a Christian People”

Taking emphatic exception to the statement “we are a Christian people,” made by Justice Sutherland of the United States Supreme Court in a recent decision which barred from American citizenship any alien who would not bear arms for his adopted land, the B’nai Brith Magazine, official monthly organ of B’nai Brith, world-wide Jewish philathropic and cultural fraternity, asserts just the contrary in an editorial in its July issue.

“To say that ‘we are a Christian people’ is to suggest that this is a nation of Christians, for Christians and by Christians,” the editorial states. “But even at the moment Justice Sutherland was handing down his opinion, the presence on the Supreme Court bench of Justice Louis D. Brandeis testified to the contrary.

“To say that the American nation is a Christian people is to say that the Jews are not of this nation and that non-believers are not of it. Certainly, Justice Sutherland had no intention even of suggesting that, but the popular notion that we are a Christian people has caused less enlightened persons to consider Jews a people apart. Therefore, it is to be regretted that the fallacious assertion has come now through a voice so responsible.”